Blog

Are you in Copenhagen tomorrow?

Join us for a rare public (FREE) introductory session on Open Challenge Framing…also known as Upstream Challenge Framing!!! This is the framing required BEFORE downstream product, service, experience design briefs are assumed.

This is an essential skill for any future focused innovation leader. The Humantific Academy Team is in Denmark working with the host of this public event, the Danish School of Media and Journalism.

Danish University & Humantific

We are delighted to be continuing our partnership with the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Denmark, building an internal team of Strategic ChangeMakers. Next week the Humantific Academy team lead by Elizabeth Pastor and Janet Getto will be teaching skill-building workshops at DMJX in Copenhagen and Aarhus.

Rising complexity and continuous change are impacting every industry including media, communications and journalism. Getting out in front of the various change curves is no easy task for any organization. The bumpy, uncertain future, full of challenges and opportunities, is arriving faster than anyone anticipated.

Trine Nielson, the visionary new Dean of DMJX, is a wonderful example of a leader proactively building internal future oriented changemaking skills among her faculty leadership team.

This is Part 2 of the skill-building program that we began last year with the faculty of DMJX, a rockin group to work with!

Public Session: Humantific Open Challenge Framing

In addition, Humantific will lead a free public session on Open Challenge Framing Feb 22 in Copenhagen. This hands-on public workshop is geared to business leaders seeking to learn adaptive strategic challenge framing skills. Being able to create challenge constellations with diverse constituents is a powerful tool for all FutureReady leaders to master. The power of Humantific Open Challenge Framing is that it is assumption-free framing applicable to highly complex fuzzy organizational and societal situations.

Today many in the marketplace are focused on ideation and rapid prototyping but are you working on the right, best challenge? Join us for this 2 hour introduction session to Humantific Open Challenge Framing. Understanding that time and resources are often limited, we focus on what should happen before ideation and implementation to ensure you are on the right track. This is a hands-on learning-by-doing session where we will practice adaptable process skills and tools, including building a universe diagram and a challenge altitude map.

What is DMJX?

“The Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX) was formed in 2008 by a merger between the Danish School of Journalism and the Graphics Art Institute of Denmark. Located in Copenhagen and Aarhus, the institution is the only place in Scandinavia that covers the whole media sector and provides design and content to the media industry (journalism, photojournalism, graphic design, interactive design, creative communication, TV and media directing and media production and management) through a wide range of Bachelor and Master’s degrees, diplomas and courses.”

For more information on Humantific Academy and our various skill-building programs send us an email: kickitup (at) humantific (dot) com.

NextD Journal Reboots!

We are delighted to be corporate sponsor of NextD Journal [Reboot], an experimental project undertaking peer reviews of 10 public documents seeking to help make sense of the mountain of confusion that now exists around the subject of “Design Thinking”.

With strategic design journalism largely nonexistent in the marketplace we believe this to be an important community sensemaking leadership project.

Celebrating 10 Years of Collaboration!

Asking “How are the people doing? rather than “How is the economy doing? Measure of America has become a legendary societal changemaking initiative. Focused on inspiring and informing policymakers regarding the need for human-centered change in US society Measure of America has been publishing a much needed form of evidence-based journalism since 2008.

Evolving into a multifaceted platform, the Measure of America initiative has become a role model for many other publications now actively involved in societal sensemaking for changemaking. From the outset, Humantific has proudly partnered with the Measure of America team and its been a great journey!

Grab Your Tapas!

Next week Humantific CoFounder, Elizabeth Pastor will be back in Barcelona teaching a workshop on EveryDay Innovation in collaboration with our friends at TeamLabs. This introductory glimpse workshop is OPEN to the public!

As methodology oriented sensemakers we did spot a key terminology fuzziness that appears in both reports.

From our Humantific perspective the most important sentence in the “Eight Futures of Work” document is this one: “…people are continuously challenged to react and adapt to large-scale economic, technological and societal shocks.”

If that is indeed the challenge you are facing then let us note that the capacity requirement often being described in the World Economic Forum reports as “adaptive”and “agile” is, in real life, not equivalent to mastery of the method branded and widely marketed today as “Agile”.

Let’s be clear: Organizational Agility and “Agile” are already known to be two different things. If time is of the essence and we want to fulfill the objects outlined in these World Economic Forum reports lets not confuse one with the other.

Design Thinking is Changing! Are You?

Returning from a long pause, an experimental version of NextD Journalwill be launching soon. Remaining focused on sensemaking the new series will undertake a ten part document review with commentary from numerous invited contributors.

Innovation, Problem Solving, Learning Rising!

The World Economic Forumhas published its updated 2022 Skills Outlook. Since we are involved in and focused on the future of work we were delighted to see so much of what we do at Humantific on the new “Growing” list including: Innovation, Complex Problem Solving, Creativity, Leadership, Critical Thinking, Emotional Intelligence, Analysis and Ideation.

We like to keep an eye of several versions of Future Work Skills Outlooks as we are actively involved in the Future Work Skills Academy.

See the 2020 Future Work Skills here! It also includes Complex Problem Solving, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Emotional Intelligence and one we really like, Cognitive Flexibility.

To learn more about how we help organizations get ready for the rapidly arriving future by skilling up in Innovation Leadership, Complex Problem Solving and activating Organizational Transformation send us an email: kickitup (at) humantific (dot) com.

Making Sense of What Matters

Humantific responds to the Harvard Business Review article by Natasha Iskander.

“This week we are doing something we don’t usually do. In the last few weeks several readers have asked us, via twitter and email, what we thought of an article that appeared recently in the Harvard Business Review so we decided to make this the focus for this weeks’ post. What we thought would not fit in the little comments box over there so we will post it here for our readers…:-)

With open minds we can see the storming is often useful, at other times counterproductive and occasionally just plain entertaining. For those who might not know, that storming is often coming from inside the design communities as much as from external players, competitors, detractors.”